Telus Corp. subsidiary Koodo Mobile is already known for touting the superiority of its customer service over competitors in its ads, but now the budget cell service provider really has something to brag about – it’s come out on top in a new customer satisfaction survey by global marketing information services firm J.D. Power and Associates.
Montreal-based telecommunications service provider Vidéotron and Regina-based SaskTel came in second and third, respectively, adding to their already above-average reputations for customer service.
J.D. Power did not publicly release the customer service ratings for any other carriers.
To conduct the survey, the company’s researchers asked more than 5,500 wireless customers how they felt about their carriers’ customer service, measuring each respondent’s satisfaction with four types: in-person and over the phone; in-store; online; and automated phone line; before assigning each carrier a score out of 1,000.
This year’s average customer service satisfaction score was 738, up from 715 in 2015, the company said. Koodo’s score was 798, with the researchers noting that it performed especially well when it came to in-store and online customer service, while Videotron scored 790, and SaskTel 785.
In addition to revealing which carriers users liked best, J.D. Power’s study provided insight into how different generations of mobile customers ask for customer service, along with the type of service that was more likely to delight or annoy them.
For example, millennials (which the researchers identified as having been born between 1982 and 1994) were more likely to contact a carrier’s customer service online, the researchers said – and were happier than others as a result. When interviewed by researchers, 40 per cent said they had contacted customer service online during the previous six months, compared with 29 per cent of other customers. Millennials were also more likely to use the automated phone system than other customers – 14 per cent versus six per cent.
Overall, the researchers found that 33 per cent of customer requests are now conducted online – a sizeable increase from 28 per cent in 2015, and more than are conducted on either phone channel or in-store.
As for how carriers can improve their customers’ opinions of them, J.D. Power found a 220-point satisfaction gap between customers whose most recent question had been answered online and those whose most recent question was not (760 vs. 540), and that customers gave carriers an 830 satisfaction rating when they were able to solve their problems online in five minutes or less, versus 677 when it took them 10 minutes or more (a 153-point gap). Customer satisfaction also went down with every web page they had to click on to resolve an issue (780 for one page vs. 654 for four or more pages).
And just as you’d expect, 47 per cent of customers with satisfaction scores of 900 or more said they “definitely will not” switch to another carrier, while only 12 per cent of customers with scores of 549 or less said the same.
You can read more about the study on J.D. Power’s website.